The Gulf

by David Poyer

  “Time yet, John?”

  He checked his watch. “About a minute more.”

  There was a familiar, sour voice above him. He looked up to see Kearn leaning on the rail on the next deck, looking down at them. “Back already?” he sneered. “I heard there was a mine. But I didn’t hear no bang.”

  For answer, Gordon straightened. The sweep second on his watch pressed on, on, and came up on the mark he’d set when Burgee popped the primer.

  “Right … about … now,” he breathed.

  A mile behind them a water plume suddenly appeared. The deck under them jumped, then shuddered as the energy of the explosion bounced from surface to bottom and back again. The thunder arrived a few seconds later, a rumble like a falling mountain. All this time, the white pyramid had been rising, incredibly slowly, till it towered now into the smoky sky.

  They all stared at it, their mouths open. The thunder rolled past them, and the pyramid began slowly to unbuild itself, collapsing back into a welter of foam and tossing sea.

  “Imagine what that would do to a ship,” he heard Maudit say. And Lem Everett, almost under his breath: “It’s beautiful. Like an iceberg, or a mountain, seen at a million years a second.”

  The last rumble of its collapse shuddered away past them, out over the calm sea, out to the four corners of the earth, out to where, as they ran their eyes tentatively around the once more flat and lusterless horizon, something enormous and dark stained the air, black as a thunderhead, in the first beginnings of a hot and hissing wind.

  19

  U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  THE little night-light burned dim as an icon candle over the bogen. If he looked hard, he could make out the outline of a door beside it, limned in the deep red radiance from the corridor. Aside from that, it was dark around him—dark, but not silent.

  Dan lay awake, listening to the ship.

  Here in the upper Gulf, the seas were choppy, piled low and quick in the short fetch by the northwest shamal. It had started late yesterday, darkening the sky. He could hear the scratch of sand-laden wind on the outer hull, next to his ear. Like a beast with a million claws, scrabbling to get in.

  But louder than that was the ship. The vast gray life-support system that enclosed, protected, informed, and nourished him and two hundred others. His ear drifted from the hiss of cooled air to the creak of flexing steel to the murmur of distant voices in CIC. Teletypes rattled faintly down the passageway in Radio, a sporadic punctuation to the steady throb of pumps, the tremolo of turbines, the endless double jingle of the fathometer.

  When he’d finally snapped off his bunk lamp, at 0230, his body had craved nothing more than sleep. Not sex, not food, just nirvanic unconsciousness. For three days, since Point Orange, he and Shaker had alternated port and starboard on the bridge and CIC. Six hours on, six off, and the time off consumed in navigation, inspections, underway routine.

  Like most Navymen, he’d learned to cope with at-sea schedules. He’d gone three, four, even five days without sleep. The body adapted. But with age it became more difficult. He was only thirty-five, but he had more sympathy now for the older men he’d served under. Now he knew what a toll it took, just staying awake.

  At last, out on his feet, he’d told Guerra he’d go over the maintenance package later. Minutes later he’d been fathoms past the level of dream. Then, some indeterminable time later, something had jerked him upward again.

  Now his mind ran on and on and would not stop. He tried the little drill he used instead of counting sheep: tracing systems. Reviewing in his head the recirculating duct work on the 02 level, or tracing chill water lines through compartments and pumps and valves. Then he’d throw in various leaks or battle damage, and try to figure out the best places for cutouts and repairs.

  This time, it didn’t work. So finally, he just fixed his eyes on the night-light and let go. Released his mind, dropped its string and watched to see where it went.

  It moved in zigzags at first. To the last time he saw Nan. She was thirteen now, willowy and snide. They’d played tennis at her stepfather’s club. She’d whomped him. Tall like me, he thought. But the golden skin, the glossy dark hair, those were Susan’s.

  It surprised him sometimes that he so seldom thought about his ex-wife. They’d been together five years. Not long for a civilian marriage, but a good run for a Navy one. After the hostage situation in Syria, she’d decided she wanted out. He’d fought to keep her. Fought with all he had, because he loved her more than he’d ever loved anyone, even himself. But it came down to a single choice: either he left the Navy or she was through.

  It hadn’t been an easy decision, but he’d made it. If it was that kind of choice, after all, he’d lost her already. And now, looking back, he couldn’t regret the way things had turned out.

  All is for the best. Wasn’t that what Alan Evlin had told him as Reynolds Ryan fought thirty-foot Arctic seas, the old destroyer foredoomed to a fiery death, and Evlin doomed with her? Dan had been fresh out of the Academy then, Ryan his first ship. Odd, how he still felt that somewhere, somehow, the gentle lieutenant who believed all men were worth loving still wished him well.

  After the divorce, he’d gone, in a way, insane. It was a common craziness in those crazy years, with the heady prospect of sex with every woman you met. Instant intimacy, if thrusting yourself within another’s body was intimacy. Driven by resentment and self-hatred, he’d raided and left woman after woman. And that was when he started to drink, nearly every night, glass after glass of neat scotch or gin till the bottle slipped from his hand.

  Dan closed his eyes in the dark, remembering an artist he’d met at a party. She was drunk as he was, her breasts falling out of her dress. They did it an hour later in the garden, against a trellis that shook, raining down the wilted petals of late roses. He’d seen her ten or eleven times that fall. Around her futon in her loft, her paintings, angular and stylized, conveyed alienation and fear, like those of a battered child. And then she’d said she loved him. He’d left her that same night.

  Once he’d been proud of his conquests. Now he was ashamed. He’d always tried to do what was right, as he understood it, except in his relationships with women. To them, he’d lied, behaved badly, hurt them. Now he was sorry, but it was too late. For the last couple of years, he’d lived alone. And, of course, he spent a lot of time at sea.

  Sea duty, the path to command … but beyond lieutenant commander, promotion grew increasingly rigorous. About half made it to commander, and only a third of those to captain. He had no illusions about how his record would look to a board. They’d react the way Shaker had. Regardless of what anyone thought, he had no special pull, through Niles or anyone else.

  Not that he cared. He’d given up ambition long ago. No, he was here because he wanted to be, and because the Navy, once in a long while, needed someone who cared more about being right than being an admiral.

  His mind moved on. He watched it coldly, wishing above all that it would stop and let him sleep. But now it decided to think about Terry Pensker.

  The black officer’s unease had come back. Dan didn’t think it was fear. Pensker did fine when the heat was on. When they’d nearly fired on the airliner, for instance. It was when things were calm he acted jittery. He’d known men like that before. Their imaginations were their worst enemy.

  Dan had discussed it with him the day before. He went back to that conversation now, trying again to make sense of it.

  It had been during XO’s inspection. The ship had gotten steadily dirtier since they’d picked up the convoy. Watch and maintenance, that was all Shaker wanted their minds on. Dan kept up his rounds, though. An exec had to know what was going on in the corners. But he shifted his priorities, to damage control and fire hazards.

  Yesterday, he’d decided to start with the missile magazine. One of the torpedomen was sitting by the scuttle in a folding chair, reading a coverless Louis L’Amour paperback. He put it away quickly when Lenson came in sight, stood up,
fiddled with his pistol belt.

  “Hello, Thompson. Catching up on your professional reading?”

  “Uh, sort of, sir.”

  “If you’ve got nothing to do on watch, study for your second-class exam. You need to.”

  “Yes, sir. Uh, you got to sign here, XO, before I can let you go below.”

  To his surprise, he’d found Pensker in the ready service room. This was a small compartment deep below the rotary magazine. It was usually unmanned, a bare space with rust stains like old blood on the deck and the air musty from the recirc unit that kept mold off the missiles. Pensker was sitting alone when he came down the ladder, pausing en route to check the linkages for the CO2 flooding system. Dan saw he was studying one of the ordnance publications. A diagram of the launching system was folded out of it.

  “Hi, Terry.”

  “Hello, XO.” Pensker flipped the pub closed, stood up, and stretched.

  “Getting some quals in?”

  “No, we got an intermittent in the test today. I thought it might be in ship’s systems, but it looks like a bad missile.”

  “Harpoon or Standard?”

  “Standard.”

  “Did you find the problem?”

  “I think so, sir.” Pensker paused. “Maybe we can get a card ordered in, fix it aboard.”

  “Are we authorized to work on the missiles?”

  “Not authorized. But if I can, we don’t have to offload it, go through all the rigging for sending it back to San Jose. It’d save us a lot of man-hours. Hell, XO, the Navy couldn’t operate if everybody did exactly what the regs say. Could it?”

  Dan gave him a faint grin back. “It depends on the reg. And the reason we have to shave it.”

  Pensker fell silent. It was then Dan caught the shadow in his eyes. And noticed that the lieutenant’s hand was dancing lightly against his leg.

  That nervousness, that elusive wariness again. He’d thought it was over. Pensker had been doing fine on the bridge and in CIC. So now what?

  Well, this was private enough to find out. And maybe it was time to. He said with forced heartiness, “I’ve been meaning to have a talk with you, Terry. Just been so much going on.… Have you got a minute? Go ahead, sit down.”

  As Pensker unfolded another chair for him, Dan hesitated. How to begin? He decided to plunge right in. “I noticed on and off, this cruise, you seem kind of on edge, kind of tense. Is anything wrong at home?”

  “Oh, no, Lena’s good.”

  “I remember her at Glynda Bell’s party. She seemed like a nice girl. You staying in touch?”

  “Yeah. She sends cards. Pictures.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, I see you talking to the captain. He grooming you for my replacement, or what?” They both chuckled. “Seriously, how are you getting along with him?”

  “Good.”

  “What do you talk about?”

  “Well, this and that, XO. Weapons-department business most of the time.”

  “Keep me cut in, Terry. The department heads have direct access to the CO at all times. But you need to keep me informed of what’s going on, so I can track possible interference with the work of the other departments, coordinate the schedule … you know how it goes.”

  “Yes, sir. Will do.”

  They looked at each other for a long moment. Finally, Dan cleared his throat. “Well, don’t make me pull teeth. What’s eating you, then? Go ahead, confide in your understanding executive officer.”

  Pensker grinned unwillingly. “Hey, nothing. Well, there is one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I was wondering, well … it sounds silly, sir.”

  “Not if it’s bothering you, Terry. Believe me.”

  “Okay.” The lieutenant’s voice went suddenly soft. “Why the hell are we here, anyway? Steaming around, escorting these guys, waiting to get hit like Strong … what’s the point, sir? I think I must have missed something.”

  Dan looked up. Through an open magazine access, he could see the nozzle of a missile booster. “I thought that was the point. Protecting trade. Protecting these merchants we’re convoying.”

  “That’s not—” The lieutenant hesitated. “Can I say this, sir? It doesn’t sound real gung ho.”

  “Let’s call it off the record, Terry.”

  “Okay, man to man, that doesn’t sound like a hell of a lot to die for. Defending a lot of oil-company ships, so they can keep their dividends up. So people can pay a nickel a gallon less for gas to get to the beach.”

  “I can’t disagree with that,” said Dan. “I feel that way sometimes myself. It isn’t like World War Two, when we were fighting for our lives.”

  “I maybe feel it more than the other guys, I know.”

  “Because you’re black?”

  Pensker said slowly, “I feel closer to other blacks, sure. Especially when they’re in danger, or when they get … the shaft … from the white world. But I didn’t mean just that.

  “See, my dad died in 1969. He was on Swift boats, a gunner.”

  Dan waited him out as Pensker’s eyes hunted into the corners. Finally, he said, all in a rush, “I’ve always felt like his life was wasted. I remember him; I was three when he left. He’s just a name on a wall now. And what for? We lost. We sent people—black people, way more than should have gone, if you look at the proportions—away to fight a war. And they died. Like him. And we still lost.

  “What we’re doing here, it feels the same way to me.”

  “We’re not losing here.”

  “We’re not even fighting here!” Pensker slammed his open hand against the booster-suppression tank. “The Iranians sink our ships, they blow up people, take hostages … we don’t do a thing! It’s the same kind of limited-war bullshit they tried in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh just outlasted us, till Congress wimped out and pulled the plug. The Ayatollah’s playing the same game.”

  “When the Iranians push us too far, we push back.”

  “I don’t see any pushing back. Why have we got ships and planes? Why’ve we got missiles? As long as we’re out here, we ought to do something.”

  “You can’t start a war by yourself, Terry.”

  “News flash, XO. We are at war. Drugs, oil, terrorists—everybody in the world thinks they can fuck us over and laugh. We ought to teach somebody they can’t.”

  “Take it easy.” Dan leaned his chair back, thinking how appealing it was. Especially to Americans: to see themselves as patsy and victim, and the panacea as violence. It had made sense to him once, too. Till he saw what the outcome was. “It’s a hell of a lot more complicated than that. But one thing’s for sure. The U.S. military doesn’t make policy. We’re here on this ship to do what we’re told. Period, full stop. And that, even just that, isn’t going to be easy.”

  The weapons officer’s eyes had gone strange then. Dan had been looking right at him when it happened. His clenched hands relaxed and opened; his fingers worked. He looked away. “Maybe so, XO,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.”

  Now, lying in the dark, Dan stared sightlessly at the overhead. Cool air brushed his face like the fingers of a ghost. Why did he have the feeling that ever since that conversation Pensker had been on the far side of a wall from him? Why did he feel that something had been left unsaid?

  Why did he feel that he’d failed?

  * * *

  At 0530 the bogen jerked him awake. After the clarity of his waking interlude, then sleep again, his brain felt as if it had been frozen and then microwaved once too often. At the fifth buzz, he got it to where he figured his mouth should be. “XO.”

  “Dan, Ben here. How about takin’ over, I’ll grab early breakfast.”

  “Yessir. Be right up.” He lay back, fell asleep again for six seconds, then forced the animal he was chained to to roll out. He folded the bunk into a sofa, pulled on khakis, decided to shave later, and headed once again for the bridge.

  Topside dawn was an eerie buff. Visibility was a mile in blowing sand. To starboard, one
of the tankers was a horizontal shadow, fading in and out of sight as the storm thickened and waned. He looked at the radar, checked the track, and talked briefly to Firzhak. Shaker was slumped in his padded chair. He looked dead. When Dan was ready, he went over. “Good morning, Cap’n.”

  The Captain opened those malamute eyes; his mouth twitched. Dan saw that the furrows had deepened. “Morning, Dan. You awake?”

  “Not sure, but I’m here.”

  “Coffee in the thermos. Get alert now, we’ll be in the Narrows in the next few hours.”

  Shaker went over the formation disposition—opened to two thousand yards to minimize the risk of collision—and told him he intended to go to GQ around ten, as they closed Farsi Island. They’d be passing within twenty miles of it, and Nauman wanted them ready.

  At last, he went below. Dan waited till Stanko announced his departure, then swung himself into the chair. A Camel smoldered in the butt kit. He stubbed it to death, then poured himself coffee. It was lukewarm, left from the midwatch, by the taste.

  Farsi Island. The big Pasdaran base. They’d have to get a grip here, tired as they were.

  He worried about that for a while. They’d been balls to the wall for three days now, since leaving Manama, everyone aboard working day and night with strip ship and drills.

  But a crew could stay cutting-sharp for only so long. Overwork, heat, stress, lack of sleep—combined they made men not just less alert but less alert in a certain way. They blanked out for seconds at a time; could be staring at a screen but not see a new contact. Port and starboard watches, six on and six off, was a bad arrangement. A man got only five hours sleep at a time, and lost that to eating, maintenance, and musters. It also upset his sense of day and night.

  Dan had often thought it was self-defeating to subject human beings to this and expect them to perform effectively. The U.S. Navy had always worked both its men and its ships harder than other navies, since at least the turn of the century. Even in port, twelve-hour days weren’t uncommon, and at sea this was more like sixteen or eighteen. The idea seemed to be that this gave you better readiness, a more professional crew.